I can’t help myself starting this post with a shameless plug. Over the last few months I’ve been doing work for various people around the world, mostly helping them model things to be printed by Shapeways. I’ve been excited by the variety of interesting projects this has led to, giving me opportunities to hone my skills with Rhino, Grasshopper, T-splines,
Author: bachman
I am a Mathematician at Pitzer College who dabbles in Art and Design. My research is in Topology, which concerns abstract 3-D spaces. I regularly teach classes in 3-D printing, and have extensive experience with Rhino3D and Grasshopper.
Illustrating Mathematics with Grasshopper
I’m currently attending a week-long conference on “Illustrating Mathematics” at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) at Brown University, in Providence, RI. I was asked to give a workshop here on using the Grasshopper plug-in for Rhino, and thought my talk would make a good blog post. This is the first time I’ve written
Making Big Art with 3D Printing
As I’ve learned more about what people recognize as “fine art,” I’ve come to realize that there are inherent problems in using 3D printing for the direct production of art. I’m not talking about philosophical questions, like whether “real art” should have hand-built elements to it. In this post I’ll discuss more a more technical question: scale vs economics. In Mathematics,
3D Printing Projects
Two weeks ago I finished teaching a semester course on the “Mathematics of 3D printing” with Tim Berg, Professor of Ceramics here at Pitzer College. Unfortunately, once the semester ended I went straight into teaching a 3 week intensive summer class in Multivariable Calculus. That didn’t leave much time for blogging! This was the third time I taught (or
Knot Theory with Rhino, Grasshopper and Kangaroo
Knots have always fascinated me. When I was young I used to get books about knot-tying from the public library and carry around some rope to practice. I enjoyed the challenge and beauty of tying a complicated decorative knot. Once when I was out in public a stranger saw me and said “If you like tying knots, you
Modelling Seashells, Part 2: An Exercise in Abstraction.
This week I describe an artistic exploration I went on after modeling as realistic looking of a seashell as I could using Rhino and Grasshopper (described here). That model was a surface defined by two different curves that were replicated, at increasingly smaller scales, around a logarithmic spiral. Once I had done this, I decided to experiment. I wanted
Knitting and Printing the Figure-8 Klein Bottle
This week I’ll describe one strategy for representing 4-dimensional objects in 3-dimensions, using both modern and traditional media. While more than three spatial dimensions is a foreign concept to most people, Mathematicians have been studying theoretical objects in four dimensions and more for over a century. (Some contemporary Mathematicians even think about infinite-dimensional things, whatever that means!).
Modelling Seashells
Anyone who has ever seen my work should have expected that sooner or later I would write a post (or two or three) about seashells…. There are many places in nature where there appear to be mathematical laws at play. For example, pinecones exhibit the mathematical phenomenon of phyllotaxis, tree branching can be modeled with various fractal-generating
3D Printing in Clay
This week has been an exciting one here at Pitzer College. I’m currently co-teaching a class on “Mathematics and 3D Printing” with our Ceramics Professor, Tim Berg. Tim is also teaching a class on mold-making that I’ve been auditing when I can. For the benefit of both classes, Tim invited Bryan Czibesz, from SUNY New
The Islamic Cube
Many years ago my wife and I co-taught a class on the Mathematics of Tilings. We have a lot of Islamic tiling patterns around our house, and I think we were excited about the class because it gave us the chance to learn more about the general theory of tilings, as well as about how these particular